As I said in my previous post, I didn’t get a new iPhone this morning due to the ridiculously long line. So I decided to focus on upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 software. It finally showed up after I continually hit the “Check for updates” button for about 45 minutes.

The new software downloaded in a few minutes and started installing. My phone was deactivated during this process. After several minutes, I started receiving the following error:

My phone was still incapacitated except for being able to call an emergency number like 911. This stayed this way for about 3 hours while I continually tried restarting, replugging, yelling, cursing, pleading, and sacrificing a chicken in order to get things to cooperate. OK, I didn’t sacrifice a real chicken, but I did buy a massive bucket of KFC.

After a few hours the phone FINALLY reactivated and came back on. However, I still get the error when selecting my iPhone in iTunes. So I can’t change my preferences, sync any applications I downloaded, or see any information about my iPhone.

I’m hoping that eventually this problem will work itself out and can only assume it’s due to the massive influx of activations from Apple and AT&T stores this morning. It seems as though someone at Apple thought it was a good idea to have new iPhone users activating at the same time as every previous iPhone user upgrades his/her phone. And apparently it didn’t make any sense to prepare for that easily anticipated enormous volume of activity.

Thanks for making this so painful, Apple. There’s a thin line between love and hate.